Discrimination and
Abuse Against Ethiopian Refugees, Asylum Seekers, and Migrants in Yemen

We
are escaping from danger in our country. We are the same as other refugees, and
yet we are not treated that way. We have food and water but no protection. We
ask why we are different from others, and UNHCR says, “The government
does not want to accept you, so we can do nothing.”

There are limits to the assistance that Yemen’s overburdened government can reasonably be expected to provide to the tens of thousands
of refugees living on its soil. But the government discriminates against
Ethiopian and other non-Somali refugees, relegating them to a second-tier
refugee status that leaves them exceptionally vulnerable to harassment and
abuse. The negative impact of this policy on Ethiopian refugees is especially
acute.

Refusal to Issue Identification
Documents to Non-Somali Refugees

All Somali refugees receive government-issued identification
documents (ID) that accord them the right to live and work in Yemen. But non-Somali refugees are not issued these or any other official identification documents;
they receive only a form issued by UNHCR acknowledging that the agency has
recognized them as refugees. This is perhaps the clearest and most
substantively important manifestation of the Yemeni government’s
discriminatory, two-tier approach to the country’s refugee population.[143]

The UNHCR-issued documents, carried by Ethiopian and other
non-Somali refugees, protect their bearers from refoulement. But they are good
for little else. The lack of any valid government-issued identification
documents severely limits non-Somali refugees’ ability to assert basic
entitlements as recognized refugees in Yemen.[144]
As one Ethiopian refugee in Sana’a told Human Rights Watch, “The
UNHCR ID has no value. The police look at it and say, ‘What is this? It
is just paper,’ and throw it away. We can do nothing with it. Anything
you need an ID card for, they do not accept it.”[145]

Lacking government-issued ID documents also leaves
non-Somali refugees vulnerable to a range of abuses, particularly extortion and
arbitrary arrest by abusive members of the security forces. Human Rights Watch
interviewed several Ethiopian refugees in Sana’a who said that they had
been stopped on the street by police officers who demanded to see their
identification and then threatened to arrest them when they could produce only
their UNHCR documentation. The pattern that emerges from the accounts gathered
by Human Rights Watch is that some police and military personnel deliberately
approach Ethiopian nationals and demand to see their IDs precisely because they
know they could not possibly have any. In each case the aim appeared to be to
use this as a pretext for extortion rather than arrest.

Human Rights Watch interviewed one physically handicapped
Ethiopian refugee who had been arrested three times while begging in the
capital. The most recent incident occurred in July 2009, when police officers
approached him in the street and demanded that he produce his ID card. When he
showed them his UNHCR refugee form, he said they told him, “We do not
know this card.” They arrested him and then released him before reaching
the police station—after he gave them all of the money he had in his
pockets.[146]

Another Ethiopian refugee told Human Rights Watch that in
February 2009 police officers extorted money from him and another refugee after
approaching them at a bus stop. The police insisted that their UNHCR documents
were no substitute for a valid ID and put the two men into a police car.
“They said, ‘Pay us money,’” one recalled. “They
abused me, saying I am bringing bad things to their country and am ruining the
country, saying, ‘You are blacks and you are bad people.’” He
paid a small bribe and the officers released them both.[147]
Other refugees offered similar accounts, and Ethiopian community leaders allege
that this kind of low-level extortion is commonplace.[148]

The lack of IDs affects refugees in other ways. For example,
Human Rights Watch interviewed two Ethiopian refugees who said that their
employers refused to give them several months of back pay after they were fired
from their jobs. Both of them told Human Rights Watch that they complained to
their employers, the police, and other government agencies. In each case they
were turned away and told that they had no right to redress since they could
not produce ID documents proving that they had the right to work in the
country.[149]

Harassment of Ethiopian
Refugees and Migrants

In addition to the practical obstacles and dangers, for many
non-Somali refugees their second-class refugee status reinforces deeper
patterns of discrimination in Yemen. This is especially true of Yemen’s Ethiopian refugee community. There is widespread racism against Ethiopians
and other Africans living in Yemen, a problem made worse by the country’s
own high levels of poverty and unemployment. Many Yemenis, struggling to make
ends meet themselves, resent African refugees and migrants as people who lay
claim to scarce public resources and job opportunities. These sentiments tend
to be at least somewhat less pronounced towards Somalis due to longstanding
historical ties between the two peoples.

Ethiopians who are not ethnic Somalis also face widespread
anti-Christian sentiment. This affects even Muslim Ethiopians due to a widely
held public perception that all Ethiopians are Christian. “Even if we are
Muslims, they don’t believe us,” one Muslim Oromo man complained to
Human Rights Watch. “Even if we pray with them.”[150]

This compounded prejudice manifests itself most commonly in
small humiliations that many Ethiopians and other Africans living in Yemen endure on a regular basis. Human Rights Watch interviewed many Ethiopian refugees in
Sana’a who complained of being regularly insulted on the street and
sometimes physically assaulted. Many female Ethiopian refugees complained of
being insulted, sexually harassed, and groped by Yemeni men on the streets or
while traveling on crowded public buses. “When I go on the bus and they
[Yemeni men] are sitting behind me, they are grabbing me,” one Ethiopian
woman in Sana’a told Human Rights Watch. “If you shout at them they
threaten you.”[151] Some
people said that they had been hit with rotten vegetables or even rocks while
walking through the streets. One Ethiopian man told Human Rights Watch,
“One time someone threw a rotten tomato at me when I was out with my
family. To avoid being beaten I kept quiet.”[152]
Another complained that, “We have to watch our children all the time…if
they go outside people are shouting at them.”[153]

Perhaps the worst and most unrelenting discrimination and
harassment is endured by Ethiopians who are known or believed to be HIV
positive. One HIV-positive Ethiopian woman living in Sana’a told Human Rights
Watch, “I can’t even go shopping because young men are always
throwing stones at me and saying I am a prostitute habesha
[Ethiopian].”[154]
Another Ethiopian refugee complained that ever since his Yemeni neighbors
became aware of his HIV status, “Even animals stay away from me. Nobody
respects me.”[155]

Violent Assaults

In some cases the prejudice endured by Ethiopian and other
African refugees escalates into serious acts of violence. Human Rights Watch
interviewed several Ethiopian refugees who suffered attacks that appeared to be
motivated by racial or religious prejudice. In many such cases the victims are
unable to secure a meaningful response from the police, who at times appear
unwilling to respond to crimes committed by Yemenis against Ethiopians.

One Ethiopian refugee described to Human Rights Watch the
attack he suffered in Sana’a one evening in August 2008:

I was walking on the street with my friend and some Yemeni
men came and said, “What is that language you are speaking?” We
said, “What do you need from us, we are just walking.” They said,
“You are destroying our country, get out of our country.” Then they
attacked us. My friend ran away and they beat me. The beat me with sticks and
fists, all over my body. There were more than five persons beating me.

The man made his way to a police station, returned in the
company of several officers, and found some perpetrators of the attack still
near the scene. But he said that the men who had attacked him turned to the
officers and said, “Are you speaking for these black people from Africa or for us? They are destroying our country. Why are you bothering us about
this?” The police left without arresting anyone and did not pursue the
case further.[156]

Human Rights Watch gathered accounts of several similar incidents
in Sana’a. One man said that he was attacked by a group of eight Yemeni
men in the street in early 2009. When he went to the police, an officer told
him, “If you have a problem with it you can return to your own
country.”[157] An
Ethiopian woman told Human Rights Watch that after a Yemeni man assaulted her
on the street and grabbed her breasts, “When I went to the police, they
just said ‘Our people would never do anything like that,’ and sent
me away.”[158]
Another Ethiopian woman had regularly gone to the police to complain about
harassment from a group of men in her neighborhood. The police took no action
but she persisted; she said that the last time she visited the station an
irritated police officer told her to stop coming to the station and threatened to
arrest her if she returned. “I didn’t go back since,” she
said, “though the problems continue.”[159]

Attacks on Oromo
Community Activists

Human Rights Watch interviewed several leading members of
the Oromo refugee community in Sana’a who said that they had received
threatening phone calls. Some had subsequently been attacked. Their callers had
demanded that they stop their “political” work, organizing the
Oromo refugee community.

Most of the recipients of these calls with whom Human Rights
Watch spoke said they believed the threats originated with officials at the
Ethiopian embassy in Sana’a, but government involvement could not be
confirmed. Some of the threatening phone calls received had been made by people
speaking Amharic, one of Ethiopia’s national languages. Many members of
the refugee community are openly sympathetic to the outlawed Oromo Liberation
Front (OLF), an armed opposition group the Ethiopian government has been trying
to eradicate since the early 1990s. Allegations of OLF support frequently lie
behind government human rights abuses in Ethiopia’s Oromia region,
targeting both OLF supporters and peaceful critics of the government.[160]
But whatever their source, the danger the threats pose are real.

On December 20, 2008, Ahmed Ibrahim Rore, the head of the
Oromo Refugee Association of Yemen (ORAY), was murdered in the street while
walking home. For several months he had been receiving anonymous phone calls
threatening him with death if he did not discontinue his work with ORAY. ORAY
was an organization that sought to promote the interests of the Oromo refugee
community in Yemen and arrange cultural activities; many of its members were
quite political and promoted an Oromo nationalist and anti-Ethiopian government
ideology.[161] On the
day he was murdered, Rore had gone to the UNHCR office and asked to meet with a
protection officer. He was unable to secure an appointment; the office is often
overwhelmed with refugees seeking immediate attention.[162]
On his way home he was attacked and murdered. There were no witnesses and the
police never identified any suspect in the case.[163]

Rore’s successor as head of ORAY told Human Rights
Watch that he began receiving threatening phone calls almost immediately after
taking up the organization’s leadership. He said that in August 2008 a
group of people visited his home late at night, knocking at the door. He did
not open it or see who was there, but before leaving one of them shot and
killed a dog that had been barking in the yard. In February 2009 several
Ethiopian men accosted him on the street and attempted to push him into a car;
a group of Yemeni men intervened and his assailants fled. He also said that in
May 2009 he was attacked on the street by an Ethiopian man wielding a metal
bar; he ran away and took shelter in a police station. Shortly after this last
attack he stepped down as head of ORAY.[164] No one
stepped forward to take his place and the organization has since become largely
defunct. “ORAY is not still active,” one former member explained to
Human Rights Watch, “because we are afraid.”[165]

Each year on World Refugee Day, June 20, UNHCR-Yemen
organizes a cultural program that features songs and other cultural
performances by Sana’a’s various refugee communities. In 2009 the
event was marred by a minor controversy when UNHCR barred Sana’a’s
Oromo Ethiopian refugee community from singing politically controversial Oromo
nationalist songs, or indeed any songs that touched on their reasons for
fleeing Ethiopia or which criticized the government of Ethiopia in any way.[166]
UNHCR’s country representative told Human Rights Watch that this was done
partly out of fear that songs on any of these topics could put their performers
at risk of violence.[167]

[162]
Human Rights Watch obtained a copy of the Request for Service Form Ahmed
Ibrahim Rore submitted to the UNHCR protection unit hours before his murder,
complaining of continued threats against his life. According to friends and
relatives, he had met several times with protection staff to discuss this
problem in the weeks and months leading up to his death. Document on file with
Human Rights Watch.

[166]
Human Rights Watch interviews with Oromo refugee community leaders,
Sana’a, July 2009; recording of conversation between UNHCR official and
Oromo refugee community leaders, on file with Human Rights Watch.